It is nowadays necessary in the installation of an elevator, in custom design work, to spend considerable time on consideration of the architecture of the particular building in which the elevator is being installed. It has been calculated that the custom planning consumes up to and over 20% of the work time spent in making the elevator at the manufacturing plant, when the elevator is a standard product. A lot of extra work to be done in custom designing arises, for instance, from potentially different distances between floors in the building, from unevenness of the shaft walls or guides, or from alterations of the elevator which have to be made on site.
In modern computer-controlled elevator systems, many kinds of testing and control programmes which report on the status and operations of the elevator and control the performance of different functions are employed. On the other hand no systems exist which would aim at a mapping of the building, although the utilization of such as a source of information serving to educate the elevator's control computer would bring obvious advantage. Therefore, the object of the present invention is to eliminate the problems encountered heretofore, and to provide, in an elevator system based on distributed intelligence, a system by the aid of which the custom design work on the elevator can be substantially reduced.